TVo/US Relations
Quiz: what do The Bullwinkle Show, The West Wing, and CSI: Miami have in common, as regards international relations? For bonus credit, add other titles I don’t know about.
7 Responses to “TVo/US Relations”
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December 7th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
No guesses?
December 10th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Stumped.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
All three invented foreign countries to be enemies of the United States. On The Bullwinkle Show, it was a gossamer-veiled Soviet state. On West Wing, it was a Gulf state that supported terrorism. On CSI: Miami, it’s a Central American state (a thinly-veiled Colombia) ruled by cocaine kingpins.
The practice intrigues me. It’s like the kids’ joke book that I had in my youth that invented a nationality so that all the Polish jokes could be told without offending anybody.
Might it not be better, in all four cases, to just not have a foreign country as the object of scorn?
December 10th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
You apparently watch a lot more television than I do. Having said that, I present Carbombya from the old Transformers cartoon.
Beautiful Carbombya, home to 4,000 people and 10,000 camels.
The really beautiful thing about 80s cartoons is that there would be episode after episode ending with special messages (”Knowing is half the battle!”) about tolerance while being filled with every racist stereotype you could imagine. It was pretty remarkable.
December 10th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
I’m not really sure that I watch a lot more TV than you do. At any given point, I’m following one to three series, and everything else I watch is either film or documentary/how-to. This number gets inflated towards the beginning of a television season, then quickly falls off. Other shows, such as Jericho, I watch retrospectively in a couple of sittings as they come out on DVD (why is “DVD” not recognized by Firefox’s spell checker?) The three shows I listed are from different decades.
Right now, I think the only show I’m in synch with is CSI, although I’ll probably catch up on House, M.D. and Bionic Woman.
My defensiveness aside, wasn’t “Knowing is half the battle!” from G.I. Joe? I don’t know for sure, as I’m not sure I ever saw a full episode of either. I suppose it could have been used for both.
December 10th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
“Knowing is half the battle!” is indeed from G.I. Joe. I was using it as an example of the sort of special learning messages that were sloppily inserted into cartoons, not as something connected to Transformers specifically.
December 10th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Currently, I’m watching no TV (although I am watching a lot of movies on DVD). That might change in the near future, but it’s looking less and less likely as the changes in my living situation solidify. Most likely, I’m just going to get a Netflix subscription again and order any shows that interest me through that.